B2B Metrics Aren't Measuring Up

A survey by marketing
automation solution provider Pardot reveals that a significant number of
business-to-business (B2B) marketers aren’t actively or accurately tracking the
revenue that their campaigns generate, a non-practice that can lead to missed
opportunities in establishing B2B marketing’s “essential role” in the growth of a
business.

For the survey, Pardot talked with dozens of anonymous B2B
marketers about their strategies and how they implement their programs,
including what they choose to measure, how they do it and the standards they
use for qualifying leads.

According to Pardot, as many as 37 percent of all marketers
simply aren’t tracking the revenue they generate. By not measuring the results
of their lead management programs, many B2B marketers are not accurately reporting
their value to their organizations.

Of those marketers who aren’t tracking and reporting their
results, approximately 40 percent said that it was because they lacked the time
and/or resources necessary to create and analyze these sometimes complex
reports.

The survey also found that 20 percent of marketers don’t
measure marketing-sourced leads at all, 30 percent don’t track “advanced”
metrics, like marketing-sourced opportunities, 35 percent don’t use lead
nurturing for less qualified leads and almost 30 percent lack the tools needed
to track leads through the sales cycle.

These are pretty dire numbers for the B2B marketing industry,
which does, at least, understand that it needs to adapt its analytics approach
to a more data-driven model; as many as 80 percent of the survey’s respondents
said that they want to spend more time in the upcoming year focusing on
marketing metrics, and 85 percent will be initiating plans that require leads
to meet a given set of criteria before they're passed on to sales teams.

In addition, the survey found that one-third of respondents
felt that marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are the most important metric for
them to measure, while marketing-contributed opportunities came in second.
Metrics that were less revenue-driven, like site traffic or page views, were
considered the least important.